THE COSTA RICA GIVEAWAY
Whole Foods has teamed up with enviro-friendly travel company Intrepid Travel to offer a flyaway to Costa Rica during the entire month of April, in order to highlight their environmental and social responsibility.
In addition to calling attention to their actions as responsible corporate citizens, Whole Foods uses the contest to promote their pineapples with a plethora of recipes, and entry forms encourage entrants to sign up for newsletters promoting Whole Foods special events and recipes, as well as Intrepid’s travel newsletter. But them you dig deeper into the site. And find links to their blog, which hosts a weekly cooking show, videos about their suppliers, and daily updates that express their corporate / environmental philosophy.
WHOLE FOODS ACROSS THE WEB
Go to their YouTube channel (1,200 subscribers), and you find 250 videos on YouTube viewed over 900,000 times, again, focusing on recipes, supplier profiles, and other enviro-conscious programming.
Hop on Flickr, you find 6900(!) pictures.
Their Twitter account alone has 1.8 MILLION followers, one of the few companies whose Twitter audience is larger than their Facebook audience. Again — recipes, replies, contests, enviro-friendly questions to spur interaction. Oh yeah, and FOUR separate Twitter feeds, in addition to regional and local Twitter feeds.
Go to Facebook, BAM! 245,000 fans, a lot fo the same content re-purposed on their wall, comments and all.
They even have a forum for fans to discuss new locations, offer a 30 Ways in 30 Days Earth Month calendar for customers to print out or pick up in the store, and have regular single-question polls as part of their “Retake Our Plates” campaign to educate customers and foster knowledge about the foods we eat — with a $100 gift card incentive for taking each poll.
And in getting ready for Cinco de Mayo, their blog is already offering a Putomayo CD set — anyone can enter the contest by replying in the comments section about their favorite party music (200 comments already, in under 48 hours).
